For this standard conception of philosophy, theory of knowledge is “first philosophy,” and all other areas of philosophy should accede to its judg- ments about the limits of knowledge. At the heart of traditional epistemol- ogy is “representationalism,” the view that we are, at the most basic level, minds containing beliefs of various sorts, and that our first task is to make sure our beliefs accurately represent reality as it is in itself. The project of determining which representations are accurate and which are not is seen as having broad implications for culture as a whole. Philosophy aims to be
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“a general theory of representation, a theory which will divide culture up into the areas which represent reality well, and those which do not repre- sent it at all (despite their pretence of doing so)” (PMN 3). It is because of its claim to be the final court of appeals for any knowledge claims whatso- ever that philosophy can see itself as foundational in respect to the rest of culture.
Epistemology-centered philosophy assumes that our primary goal as philosophers is to find a set of representations that are known in such a way as to be beyond the pale of doubt. Once such privileged representations are identified, they can serve as the basis for the foundationalist project of justifying beliefs that make a claim to being knowledge. The representa- tions that have been taken to be inherently and automatically accurate have been of two sorts. First, there are beliefs based solely on the meanings of the terms they contain,analyticsentences such as “A doe is a female deer.”
Second, there are beliefs that immediately register the deliverances of sen- sory experience, beliefs such as “Red here now” or “Ouch! Pain!” The ideal of foundationalism is to ground our entire system of beliefs on the basis of such bedrock representations.
Philosophy and the Mirror of Natureis especially good at spelling out some of the core assumptions about foundationalism and representationalism widely accepted by the philosophical mainstream. The dominant outlook in Anglo-American philosophy assumes that the world consists of natural kinds of items and that our task is to achieve a correct mapping of these types – a grasp of how the world is “carved up at its joints.” This approach assumes a sharp distinction between the world of facts, on the one hand, and our minds and their representations, on the other. And it assumes that since natural science alone is properly equipped to know reality as it is in itself – since it alone succeeds in identifying facts – it is the only form of inquiry that achieves true knowledge. All other purported forms of knowledge (moral reflection, literary criticism, theGeisteswissenschaften) can only hope to approximate the ideal of knowledge achieved by natural science.
Rorty thinks this entire conception of our epistemic situation is shot through with conceptual logjams and insoluble puzzles. The prime offender in this circle of problems is the uncritical assumption that representation- alism gives us the right picture of our basic predicament. To circumvent these puzzles, Rorty suggests that we need to replace “the notion of knowl- edge as the assemblage of representations” with “a pragmatist conception of knowledge” (PMN 11) that focuses on what humansdoin coping with the world rather than on what theyfindthrough theorizing.
Introduction 9 Rorty gives the name “epistemological behaviorism” to the pragma- tist conception of knowledge he works out inPhilosophy and the Mirror of Nature. His alternative approach is called “behaviorism” (or “psychological nominalism”) because it rejects the idea that experiences play a crucial role in making sense of our claims to knowledge and proposes instead that we see knowledge as based on social practices. Epistemological behaviorism is claimed to be the common denominator in the three philosophers Rorty takes as role models for his critique of traditional philosophy – Wittgenstein, Dewey, and Heidegger. But the key arguments he uses to support this view are taken from Quine and Sellars.
From Quine, Rorty takes the critique of the analytic–synthetic distinc- tion, the distinction between sentences that are true solely by virtue of the meanings of the words they contain and others that are known through experience.3 The upshot of this argument is that any statement can be re- vised when it is found to be inconsistent with a large enough batch of our beliefs. Although we are inclined to suppose that such sentences as “A doe is a female deer” are analytic – that is, true by virtue of the concepts they contain – Quine’s argument suggests that the apparent infallibility of such sentences results more from their central position in our web of beliefs than from anything having to do with the meanings of concepts. Given suf- ficient pressure from other areas of our web of beliefs, we would be willing to abandon any belief.
What this shows is that no beliefs have the status of being privileged rep- resentations solely because they are analytic or conceptually true. Instead, our beliefs form a holistic web in which the truth of any particular belief is established on the basis of its coherence with the whole set of beliefs. From this critique of the idea that some sentences are true solely by virtue of the meanings of their terms, Quine calls into question the usefulness of the very idea of meanings – understood as mental items – in determining reference or the correctness of belief. Quine’s rejection of “the idea idea” – the idea that ideas mediate between us and things – is one key building block in Rorty’s attempt to show that the mental has no crucial role to play in making sense of our capacities as knowers.
The second building block of Rorty’s epistemological behaviorism is Wilfrid Sellars’s attack on “the Myth of the Given” in his essay “Empiri- cism and the Philosophy of Mind.”4In this essay, Sellars calls into question the traditional empiricist assumption that our ability to use language and our knowledge of the world must be grounded in immediate sensory expe- riences, in raw feels and preconceptual sensations that are just “given” in the course of our transactions with objects.
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In opposition to this assumption, Sellars claims that “all awareness is a linguistic affair.” To back up this claim, he draws a distinction between (1) awareness as discriminative behavior (the raw ability of sentient creatures to register inputs from the environment, a capacity common to humans and amoebas) and (2) awareness that involves the ability to notice whatsortof thing something is (the ability of sapient beings to perceive somethingas such and such). The first type of awareness is a matter of causal interaction with the world – being affected by pain, for example, or responding dif- ferentially to stimuli in one’s environment. Sellars does not deny that such episodes and states occur, but he holds that they can have no role to play in grounding knowledge. This is so because knowledge, that is, justified true belief, always has a propositional structure – it is beliefthatsuch and such is the case. Moreover, the only way a proposition can be justified is by means of inferences from other propositions – in Rorty’s words, “there is no such thing as justification which is not a relation between propositions”
(PMN 183). It follows, then, that only the second type of awareness can be used to justify knowledge claims. It is not the raw stimulus in the percep- tual field that is relevant to knowledge, but the awarenessthat“this is red,”
which contributes to the formation of justified true belief.
Where empiricism tried to show how all concepts arise from particu- lar instances of sensory experience, Sellars, like Wittgenstein before him, argues that one must already possess a fairly wide range of concepts before one can have sensory experience in the epistemically relevant sense. To be aware of something in a way that can serve as a basis for knowledge, we must know whatsortof thing it is, and that means being able to experience the thing under a description – to see that it isFbut not-G, not-H, and so on.
We “have the ability to notice a sort of thing” only if we already “have the concept of that sort of thing.”5 Since, on Sellars’s view, having a concept is being able to use a word, it follows that having a concept involves being a participant in a linguistic community in which justifying claims is car- ried out. Awareness in the relevant sense always presupposes the ability to abide by the norms that govern the shared space of reasons of a linguistic community. Justification is therefore always “a matter of social practice”
(PMN 186). Sellars sums this up by saying, “The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or state [of observing] as that of knowing. . ., we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.”6
Rorty interprets Sellars as having shown that justifying knowledge claims “is not a matter of a special relation between ideas (words) and ob- jects, but of conversation, of social practice” (PMN 170). Forming beliefs,
Introduction 11 determining what we know, defending our claims – these are all matters of interacting with others in a linguistic community where the members exchange justifications of assertions with one another. There is no basis for deciding what counts as knowledge and truth other than what one’s peers will let one get away with in the open exchange of claims, counterclaims, and reasons. And this means that justification reaches bedrock when it has reached the actual practices of a particular community. As Rorty puts it in a later essay, “reference to the practices of real live people is all the philosoph- ical justification anybody could want for anything” (ORT 157). Quinean holism and Sellarsian antifoundationalism tell us that, in the search for grounds for beliefs, there is no exit from the beliefs and reasons we cur- rently accept as a community. The conclusion to draw is that “nothing counts as justification unless by reference to what we already accept, and that there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence” (PMN 178).
Rorty is the first to admit that this conception of the public space of reasons entails a thoroughgoing ethnocentrism, the claim that the project of grounding knowledge claims is circumscribed by the practices of a particular cultural group at a particular point in history. For, in his view, we can find no higher tribunal than our current practices to use in trying to ground those practices. When asked about this “we” who determine truth and knowledge, Rorty bluntly says that it is “us educated, sophisticated, tolerant, wet liberals” (TP 52), us products of contemporary, affluent, bourgeois North Atlantic culture, who make up the vast majority of philosophers today. On this view, to say thatpis a warranted assertion is to say that we can “feel solidarity with a community that viewspas warranted” (TP 53).
It is important to see that Rorty’s claims about what philosophy can do are based on a rather austere, minimalist conception of what one can possibly say in talking about things. In Rorty’s account, all talk about the world concerns either causal interactions or justification. With respect to talk about our causal transactions with the world, Rorty wholeheartedly affirms the “brute, inhuman, causal stubbornness” of objects (ORT 83), but he thinks that the brute physical resistance and shoves we receive from the world are irrelevant to accounting for the justification of our beliefs.
This is so because totally arbitrary causal factors may be involved in the formation of beliefs. A mathematician, for example, might arrive at beliefs about mathematical relations as a result of delusions that are themselves caused by chemical imbalances in his brain. Yet the truth of those math- ematical discoveries is independent of those causal factors. As a general strategy, Rorty adopts a “neo-Darwinian” approach to belief, analogizing a
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culture’s getting particle physics right to elephants coming to have a trunk (TP 152). All sorts of arbitrary factors may have causally contributed to the emergence of Galileo’s view of motion, yet none of these is relevant to the question of whether Galileo’s views are better than Aristotle’s.7
With respect to talk about the justification of belief, we have nothing to go on besides our actual practices as a community of inquirers. Certainly causal factors enter into this domain. But such causal factors are always processed by the programs we have devised for ourselves in becoming the kinds of people we now are. “We humans program ourselves to respond to causal transactions between the higher brain centers and the sense organs with dispositions to make assertions,” Rorty says. “There is no epistemo- logically interesting difference between a [computer’s] program state and our dispositions” (TP 141). What is distinctive about our own case is that we have no way to step outside ourselves to look at the unprocessed causal inputs as they are prior to processing in order to compare them to the way they come out after they have been processed. There is simply no way to gain access to reality as it is in itself in order to ground our ways of talking in the “things themselves,” no way to “distinguish the role of our describing activity, our use of words, and the role of the rest of the universe in account- ing for the truth of our beliefs” (TP 87). And if there is no independent test of the accuracy of our beliefs, if there is no way to compare belief and object to see if they correspond, we have nowhere to turn for justifications than to the ongoing practice of reason-giving and deliberation. Objects and their causal powers drop out as explanatorily useless. Rorty suggests that saying “Our talk of atoms is right because of the way atoms really are” is like saying “Opium puts people to sleep because of its dormitive powers”
(ORT 6). It seems, then, that objects and their causal powers can play no role in justifying belief. Justification is achieved in the space of reasons in which beliefs are played off against one another according to social norms.
As Rorty says, “only a belief can justify a belief” (TP 141).
The pragmatist picture of our situation as knowers leads to a radical overhaul of our ordinary ways of thinking about truth. Traditionally, truth has been conceived as a matter of correspondence between beliefs in our minds and facts out there in the world, between a sentence and “a chunk of reality which is somehow isomorphic to that sentence” (ORT 137). The trouble with this conception of truth as a relation between something in us and facts “out there” is that it assumes that we can pick out and identify worldly items called “facts,” items that have objective existence independent of us and our beliefs, in order to establish that there is a relationship between them and our beliefs. Yet the only way to pick out and identify a fact is by
Introduction 13 means of the vocabulary in which we formulate our beliefs. In this sense, facts are artifacts of our language, not things that have an independent existence distinct from us and our beliefs. There are, of course, objects with causal powers out there in the world. But there is no way these objects can congeal into sentence-shaped facts except through our uses of language to describe them and talk about them. Besides, as Rorty never tires of saying, the very idea of facts as truth makers becomes absurd when we think of such true sentences as “Love is better than hate,” “Shakespeare wrote better plays than Jonson,” or “There is no Santa Claus.”
Once the concept of a fact is abandoned – once we grant that there is no way to make sense of the idea of nonlinguistic entities our linguistic entities can be true of – the whole cluster of notions traditionally employed when talking about truth also must be abandoned. Beliefs are seen not as intentional relations to reality, but instead as tools for coping with things, means of adaptation to the environment we have picked up over the course of our evolution. And truth is no longer seen as a relation to reality, but instead as a feature of our interactions with one another. InPhilosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty was inclined to describe truth as “warranted assertability” and to see the concept of truth as inseparable from that of justification (PMN 176). As the years have passed, however, he has come to hold that it will always make sense to say, for any beliefp, thatpis regarded as fully justified by a speech community, yetpis actually false. As a result, he now adopts what he calls a “minimalist” or “deflationist” approach to truth (TP 21–2). There is no way to give a definition or analysis of the concept of truth. The most one can say about truth is that, for any word to count as a translation of our word “true,” its use in the language of a linguistic group must satisfy Tarski’s Convention T, which dictates (putting it roughly) that, for any sentence S, “ ‘S’ is true in language L if and only if S” (for example,
“ ‘Schnee ist weiss’is true in German if and only if snow is white”). Though this “breezy disquotationalism” does nothing to clarify truth, it gives us all we can ever say about the topic of truth (TP 21).
InConsequences of Pragmatism, Rorty sums up the strand of philosophy he finds in Sellars, Quine, and others as leading to the idea of the “ubiquity of language” (CP xix), the view that (as 1970s postmodernists were wont to say) there is “no exit from the prison-house of language.” In an important essay, “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,”
Rorty refers to the idea of the ubiquity of language as “textualism” and argues for the idea as follows. First, he notes that “all problems, topics, and distinctions are language-relative – the results of our having chosen to use a certain vocabulary, to play a certain language game” (CP 140).
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Second, he claims that, since “any specification of a referent is going to be in some vocabulary,” and since there is no way to refer to anything outside all vocabularies, “we shall not see reality plain, unmasked, naked to our gaze” (CP 154). From these premises he concludes that the idea of gaining access to reality as it is in itself, independent of any particular mode of description, makes no sense. And this, in turn, implies that the very idea of justifying what we say by something independent of what we say makes no sense. If there is no way to justify our use of one vocabulary over another by reference to the way things are outside of all vocabularies, and if assertions are always vocabulary-dependent, it follows that there is no way to justify any truth claims by reference to nonlinguistic reality. A “thorough-going pragmatism” will therefore abandon “the notion ofdiscovering the truth”
and recognize that the only point to inventing vocabularies is to “help us get what we want” (CP 150–1).
The claim that truths are made, not found, is presented succinctly in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity: “Since truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths” (CIS 21). Rorty does not want to deny that reality (understood as the totality of objects in causal transactions) is “out there.” But he insists that “truth is not out there,” where this just means “that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations” (CIS 5).Withina particular language game or practice, we can speak of letting the world determine what is right or wrong. Given the game of checkers, for example, the position of the pieces on the board can justify us in saying “Red wins.” But the idea that reality determines correctness seems to fail when we speak of vocabularies as wholes. When it comes to questions about vocabularies as wholes, our concern should be with achieving solidarity with others in our community, not with getting reality right.
The pivotal concept in Rorty’s version of pragmatism is that of a “vo- cabulary” or “language,” a concept he draws partly from Wittgenstein and partly from Quine and Davidson. But the notion is perhaps best understood as a development of Thomas Kuhn’s conception of “normal discourse” in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.8In a Postscript to the second edition of that book, Kuhn defines a “paradigm” as a “disciplinary matrix,” where this is understood to include standardized and widely accepted texts and formulations; a tacitly agreed-upon sense of what is real; agreement about what questions are worth asking, what answers make sense, and what crite- ria of assessment are to be used; and a background of shared practices and